Project Description

OASIS (Outdoor Action for Social and Intrapersonal Stregth) is a project I am running at the Durham Nativity School in Durham, North Carolina. The Durham Nativity School is a nonprofit organization that provides free private school tuition to at-risk middle school students in the Durham area. OASIS is a supplemental retreat program for the students at this school. We take their students (approximately 15-35 students are expected to attend each retreat) on weekend long retreats to various areas that are relatively near (but outside of) the Durham area. Through these retreats, OASIS aims to allow students to grow and benefit from opportunities to partake of events that require them to move outside their comfort zones. These activities are also new, exciting, and fun for the students, and might include such things as parasailing, whitewater rafting, and snowboarding. While challenging, these activities are also both fun and easily possible to complete with a degree of courage and confidence. Also, throughout the weekend, OASIS incorporates small group discussions, large group talks, skits, journal writing activities, and other team-building events designed to bring home our message, connecting the values learned and practiced during the major activities to the serious challenges the students face in their home lives.

Our goal is to help students begin to realize that they have the ability to try new things and emerge successfully from challenges that may seem new or scary. While we do not expect to completely transform a student's character in one weekend, we do hope to positively supplement the character development that is already occurring at the Durham Nativity School and extend the things the students learn in school to a more casual and applicable environment with their peers and friends. This includes several opportunities for academic growth. The principle of the Durham Nativity School has identified writing as a lagging skill, so we are developing several journal writing activities that will help improve writing skills and also facilitate self-reflection and self-evaluation throughout the weekend. Also, the main OASIS activities are extremely fun for the students. These students come from very poor families and experience an extreme number of hardships in their lives. Their likelihood of encountering an opportunity to parasail or snowboard in a safe setting that encourages them to challenge themselves and try new things is very low, if at all existent. Therefore, OASIS provides these opportunities to a population of youth that would most benefit from them and be least likely to find them on their own.

OASIS also has the parallel goal of uniting students from various colleges nearby Durham. Currently, it involves students from Duke University, Elon University, and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. We are hoping to use OASIS as an opportunity for students from the schools surrounding the Durham area to meet each other, attend retreats together, and begin collaborating together on innovative projects and ideas.